


Talk Awhile of 'Me' and 'Thee'

by mimizans



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Barry Bluejeans & Lucretia, Barry Bluejeans/Lup - Freeform, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-06 04:10:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12203607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimizans/pseuds/mimizans
Summary: Lucretia and Barry share a lot of things. At first, it's their shy, bookish natures and their impulse towards reflection over action. They share an interest in esoteric thinking and in poetry, and they share a utilitarian practical streak. Later, they share loneliness, grief, despair, and anger - one from her ivory tower in the sky, the other from the subterranean cavern where he hides.(An exploration of the relationship between Barry and Lucretia before, during, and after.)





	1. beneath the music from a farther room

**Author's Note:**

> what the world wants: sweetness and light
> 
> what i give the world: sadness

"There was a Door to which I found no Key  
There was a Veil past which I could not see  
Some little Talk Awhile of _Me_ and _Thee_  
There Seemed - and then no more of _Thee_ and _Me_."

\- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Quatrain 32  
\- - -

As Barry is falling from the ship, pain from Taako’s spell blossoming in his chest and his heart spasming as it struggles to beat, he is afraid. A few moment ago - when he couldn't remember Lup's face, when Taako was staring back at him blankly, when he felt Fisher’s static infiltrating his brain like a parasite – Barry felt terror for the first time in a long time. 

He used to be so fragile, he thinks. Everything had scared him when he was young - light that was too bright, darkness that was too deep. Strangers that he couldn't look in the eye, and acquaintances that he didn't want to upset. He grew out of most those things, of course, and the rest had been stomped out by a hundred years of meeting new people and loving the ones he already knew. There is very little that scares him now, really. The sensation of fear he's feeling now is almost novel. Barry thought that he’d remembered fear that day he woke up to find Lup’s side of the bed cold, but he realizes instantly upon forgetting the measurements of her smile and the span of his hands on her hips that he was wrong. The fear of never seeing Lup again pales in comparison to the abject horror he felt when her face was purged from his mind.

Barry doesn’t regret asking Taako to kill him. He is secure in the knowledge that as soon as his stubborn heart stops beating, he’ll remember everything about Lup, from her too-long second toe to her loud, bright laughter. Still though, death is unpleasant, and Barry understands that this death will be different from every other bodily expiration he’s experienced.

Isolation comes with death when you’re a lich. You die, but you don’t pass to the great beyond to drift for eternity in the embrace of a billion, billion souls. You die, and you pull yourself up from your still-warm corpse. You die, and you hold your very existence together through sheer force of will. You die, and instead of curling against your love as she falls asleep, you keep a silent vigil over her until morning. Or, in this case, you die because you asked your brother to kill you and he did, even as he forgot your face. And when you pull yourself up from your broken body, your mind will be right, and you will remember everything and everyone, but you will be alone.

As he falls, Barry realizes that there will be no distraction from his reality this time around. No Magnus to feign fear every time Barry floats into a room, no Taako making everyone suffer through months of spicy food because it’s the one of the only flavors Barry can taste as a lich. No Merle and Davenport to endlessly make ghost puns when they see him drifting through the Starblaster’s corridors. No Lucretia to stay up late and talk about philosophy with him just so he didn’t have to be alone. No Lup to watch over. 

Barry will be dead now, and well and truly _alone_. Separated from his family by a betrayal he wishes he had seen coming.

As Barry falls, he experiences - perhaps for the first time - an intolerable emptiness. Sadness. Longing. For a hundred years, he has clung to the certainty of his family. Now, he realizes that they are gone. He will die alone, being buffeted by the wind whipping across Faerun, and he will spend his afterlife alone, separated from those he loves by knowledge and distance. There is nothing they can do to help him. Not now.

Before Barry hits the ground, he feels his heart seize in his chest. Fear and loneliness mingle with pain for one excruciating moment, and he feels a dull sense of panic deep in his soul. Horror over what has just happened, dread over what is to come.

As he closes his eyes for the last time in his body, Barry almost laughs. He had forgotten what honest-to-goodness terror felt like. He’ll have to thank Lucretia for reminding him.


	2. what the world will do to color

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucretia sleeps in a crypt. 
> 
> Before that, she has some company on laundry night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah can i get uhhhhhh overwhelming sadness

"My damage was easy.  
My plainspoken voice is a watercolor. I’m afraid of it  
as I’m afraid of what the world will do to color. I don’t  
think I’ve done much. A table leans against itself  
to be a table. I hold nothing but this air. I give it off."  
\- _Let Everything Happen to You_ , Natalie Eilbert

After Lucretia fed the last of her journals to Fisher, she walked the length of the ship. Magnus was down in her quarters, passed out on the cold floor and bathed in the light of Fisher’s tank. She found Merle and Davenport together, cards strewn around them haphazardly, their heads resting on the tabletop. Taako was on the deck, looking like he’d simply fallen where he stood. His wand was in his hand, and Lucretia wondered what spell he’d cast. She wondered what he’d tried to do to save himself. 

Lucretia only spent one night on the ship with the husks of her friends. She moved them all to bed, confused and pliant as they were, and burned spell slots to make sure they stayed asleep. She sat in the kitchen for hours with a cup of tea that she never even raised to her lips.

When she finally talked herself into going to bed, she laid in her room and stared at the ceiling. She listened for the sounds of the world outside - wind, rain, chirping bugs, croaking frogs. Anything to anchor her to the reality of the space she was in. There was nothing. The night was deathly quiet, like it knew what she had done and was waiting for an explanation. In lieu of white noise, Lucretia’s exhausted mind conjured up sounds. 

She heard the hushed, secret sound of Lup and Barry laughing softly on the way to their quarters. She heard Taako whistling as he drummed his knuckles on the wall all the way down the corridor, on his way to the kitchen for a complicated midnight snack. She heard Magnus’s heavy footsteps outside her door, a little sluggish after hours in the gym. She heard Merle’s too-loud voice echoing down the corridor as he explained an old Pannite tradition to Davenport. 

Lucretia nearly cried in grief and frustration as she lay in bed and listened to the sounds of her friends as they were, as they _would be_ if not for her. Eventually, the tortuous noise was replaced with silence as the voices faded away, back into the ether. Gone, gone, gone. 

Those people, the people her friends has been, weren’t around anymore. Their bodies lay in rooms just feet from hers, but they weren’t there. Not really. Lucretia realized with a dull shock that she had created a crypt. 

Lucretia had visited a crypt once, when she was young. Her teenage friends had spooked at every creak of the trees outside the decrepit structure. They were struck by the presence of dead bodies too near and still scared enough of their own mortality to find corpses repulsive and intriguing. Lucretia hadn’t minded the bodies. Even at fifteen, she had been an old soul. She’d seen her father’s body when he’d passed, and her cousin’s when he had been trapped under a moving combine, and her neighbor’s when Lucretia had been the one to notice the smell and find her. Corpses no longer held any sway over Lucretia.

The crypt had put her on edge, though. It was one thing to confront a familiar body devoid of life. Lucretia could reconcile that as a natural function of the passage of time. It was another thing entirely to walk through a quiet crypt past midnight, the silence broken only by footsteps and too-loud breathing. There was something about death being out of sight, tucked away inside the walls, that made Lucretia pull her robe tightly around her body with shaking hands. She didn’t like the way that the crypt kept bodies from the earth and made death unnatural. She didn’t like the loneliness she felt as a living woman among the dead. 

The Starblaster was a crypt, Lucretia realized, and it was haunted to boot. All that silence where there should have been noise, and noise where there should be none. Beds and stovetops made cold. Her family removed from context. Lucretia supposed it was more accurate to say that they’d had their context removed from them, but that was semantics. The result was the same. Lucretia was alone, and she’d created her tomb.

The Starblaster had been Lucretia’s home for a hundred years, and now it was full of ghosts.

-

-

-

“Oh, hello,” Lucretia says, blinking owlishly. 

Barry blinks back at her. He looks surprised to have been caught here, sitting on top of a dryer in the ship’s laundry room. His head had snapped up comically from the book in his lap when Lucretia had bumped the door open with her hip, and he’s grimacing at her like he’s bracing himself for jokes at his expense. 

There have been quite a few of those over the past cycles. Barry is a squishy target for Taako and Lup’s near-constant ribbing, and while the twins never mean anything by it Lucretia can understand why Barry would be on guard. She probably would be too if she were the traditional nerd variant that Barry is. Fortunately for Lucretia, she comes off as a quiet, odd professor rather than a high school chemistry club president.

Barry doesn’t need to worry about catching flak from Lucretia, though. He may be holed up in the laundry room with a book at 2 a.m., but there’s a certain renegade weirdness in that. Lucretia’s just here to do her laundry. 

“I didn’t mean to - I mean, am I... interrupting... you?” Lucretia says, clutching her laundry basket in front of her. 

“Uh, no, not all,” Barry says, his deep voice echoing off the tiled floor. “I was just, uh, reading.”

Lucretia wants to clarify, “In the laundry room?” But she doesn’t. She still feels just a touch guilty, like she saw something she shouldn’t have.

“I’m going to do my laundry,” she says instead. “Is that okay?” She grimaces even as the words leave her mouth. Stupid question.

Barry tilts his head like he’s thinking the same thing. Lucretia hopes she’s projecting. “Yeah, totally,” he says. “I’m the one using the laundry room for an off-brand purpose.” He hops down off of the the dryer and readjusts the waistband of his jeans. As he does, the book he was holding slips from his fingers. It hits the ground and slides under the dryer, and Barry sighs deeply.

He gets down on his hands and knees and peers under the appliance. “You know, I’ve never been smooth for a single moment in my entire life,” he says, his tone conversational. “I get caught sitting in a laundry room like a weirdo and then I can’t even walk out the door without looking like an idiot.”

“It’s fine,” Lucretia says, watching him grope underneath the dryer. “I like solitude too. Not that I don’t love everyone on the crew, of course. They can just be a little...” 

“Rambunctious?” Barry supplies, pulling his book from his hiding place.

“I was going to say nightmarish,” Lucretia replies, shrugging.

Barry turns to stare to her for a moment from his spot on his floor, his eyebrows raised. Then he smiles. “You’re joking,” he says, pointing a finger at her.

“I am,” Lucretia agrees, a small smile springing to her lips.

Barry snaps triumphantly, his grin widening. “I knew I’d figure you out one day.”

Lucretia laughs, and Barry blinks in surprise, like he's just been given an unexpected gift. “Am I a mystery?” Lucretia asks, setting her laundry down next to the washing machine. 

Barry leans his head back against the dryer. “Kind of,” he says with half of a shrug. “You’re hard to get a read on. So quiet and stoic.” He straightens his posture in an imitation of Lucretia’s perfectly straight back. 

She laughs again, a little louder this time. “ _I’m_ hard to read? You barely said a word to anyone without being spoken to first for the entire first year.” 

“No hidden depths here, though,” Barry says, laughing back. “I’m exactly what I look like: a shy nerd who’s better with data than people.”

“No hidden depths, huh?” Lucretia says, more to herself than to Barry. She opens the washing machine and begins loading her clothes, taking special care as always to keep her IPRE robes separate from the rest. “What are you reading, Barry?”

She knows it’s the right question because he immediately turns red. “Just, some, um. Poetry,” he replies, levering himself up off the floor and failing to meet her eyes. “From the last world we were on.”

“Oh?” Lucretia replies, glancing at him with bright eyes. “That plane had really beautiful art. Who’s the author?”

Barry is suddenly very interested in the patch of wall behind Lucretia's head. “It’s an anthology,” he replies carefully, but he seems to sense that he’s not going to get out of answering Lucretia’s inevitable next question. “Romantic poetry,” he clarifies. Barry clears his throat, and it’s a tight, nervous sound.

Lucretia laughs softly as she closes the lid of the washer and starts the cycle. She turns to face Barry, leaning her hip against the softly vibrating machine. “See? Hidden depths. I never would’ve pegged you for a romantic.”

“But I should’ve guessed you’d be a crack investigator,” Barry says, stowing the slim volume in the inside pocket of his robe. He sighs. “You’re not going to ask why?”

Lucretia smiles and shakes her head. She may not be great at engaging with people, but she is good at watching them - and she’s watched Barry watch Lup more times than she can count. “Do I really need to?”

Barry huffs out a breath. “Point taken,” he says with a self-effacing smile. “Well, I’ll, uh, leave you to your laundry, I guess.”

“You can stay,” Lucretia says quickly as he starts to walk towards the door. He turns back, a question on his face. “I wouldn’t mind the company.” It feels like a lot to ask for, but Lucretia figures she's known Barry for a couple of years now. She can ask for this.

Barry smiles at her, obliging as always. “Well, with that kind of invitation.” Hands in his pockets, he walks back over to the dryer and boosts himself up. The backs of his shoes knock against the machine’s door, like a child in a chair that’s too big. 

“I’m going to need that dryer, you know,” Lucretia says.

“Not now,” Barry replies with a shrug. He pulls his book back out of his pocket and opens it to a dog-eared page. 

Lucretia cringes, but doesn’t comment. Instead she says, “Which poem in the book is your favorite?”

Barry glances up at her, then flips back a few pages. “I’ll read it to you,” he says softly, and then he does. He doesn’t have the perfect voice for reading poetry aloud, but Lucretia appreciates the honesty in his delivery. That counts for a lot. 

When he finishes he’s turned slightly red again, and Lucretia smiles at him warmly. “ _Trees / and seas have flown away, I call it / loving you._ That’s beautiful.”

“I think so too,” Barry says, his eyes still on the page. Then he looks up at her and laughs like he’s shaking off cobwebs. “Look at us, doing laundry and reading poetry. Real go-getters we are. "

“We’re just old souls,” Lucretia says. The steady vibration of the washing machine continues against her hip. It's a soothing counterpoint to the too-bright lights overhead. 

“Yeah,” Barry confirms. “Old, tired souls who love household chores and poetry.”

“I can feel the Fantasy Werther’s materializing in my pockets,” Lucretia says, and smiles softly when Barry laughs. 

“Thanks for asking me to stay,” Barry says, searching Lucretia’s face like he’s looking for clues. She’s not sure what he hopes to find. “Being alone is nice sometimes, but others... it can be overrated." “I guess that’s the one good thing about our predicament,” Lucretia muses. “We have each other. We’re never really alone.”

“Shared experiences,” Barry agrees.

“ _Home is nowhere, therefore you_ ,” Lucretia says with a smile. Barry smiles back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm very proud of myself for keeping my once a week scheduling promise! fun fact, a lot of this actually got rewritten because it was TOO overwhelmingly sad and it was messing with me. 
> 
> chapter title & verses at the beginning are from "let everything happen to you" by natalie eilbert, available to read [here](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/let-everything-happen-you).
> 
> the poem that barry reads and that lucretia quotes from is "you, therefore" by robert philen, available to read [here](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49268/you-therefore)

**Author's Note:**

> hey... how was that? a little stage setting. 
> 
> i hope to update this weekly, but uh, law school, so we'll see. the next part is mostly written; it's a longer lucretia pov and contains some flashback stuff. also if you hadn't noticed this story comes complete with freshman lit references to "the love song of j. alfred prufrock" lmao. the story title is from a poem (probably) alluded to in prufrock, while the chapter title is a line directly from prufrock itself. for reference, here's the lines before and after:
> 
> "I know the voices dying with a dying fall  
> Beneath the music from a farther room.  
>  So how should I presume?"


End file.
